Today, Explained - Kevin McCarthy wants you to get a job

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

With the debt ceiling deadline approaching, Republicans want to expand rules that require welfare recipients to work. Vox’s Dylan Scott and Marketplace’s Krissy Clark explain. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi and Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The recurring fight over whether to raise the debt ceiling is a uniquely American phenomenon. We've talked about this on the show before. Yeah, my first debt ceiling fight was 2011, and I was an intern and still in college. And so I've been doing this my entire professional life, and it seems like it will never end. Recently, atop Capitol Hill, another uniquely American phenomenon unfolded. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed, as part of the negotiations over the debt ceiling, work requirements for Americans getting government assistance in the form of welfare programs and even Medicaid. It is such a good

campaign issue, and it makes people's blood boil, I think, for all of the reasons that we were just talking about, because it appeals to all these things we want to believe about America. McCarthy has pointed out that Americans voting for other Americans to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is nothing new. This is something that President Biden and Senator voted for. He did. This is something that President Bill Clinton signed. He did. Welfare reform, class of 96. Decades ago, America decided if you want help, you need to work. How's that been working out for us? Coming up on Today Explained.

The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals.

Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Dylan Scott, we call him the other Dylan, is a senior correspondent at Vox who's been looking into what the Republican Party wants. The House Republicans want two things,

and they were included in the bill that the House passed in the last few weeks to kind of get these negotiations started. One, they want to enhance work requirements that already exist for two programs called TANF, which provides or originally was intended to provide cash assistance to low-income families, and SNAP, which is food stamps, basically, cash assistance that helps people pay for food. What work requirements actually do, help people get a job. Every data point shows that, and it helps people move forward. What they also want to do is add work requirements to Medicaid, which is the big government health insurance program

that covers people who live in or near poverty. There are about 90 million people enrolled in Medicaid, at least at the start of this year. What are the existing work requirements for SNAP or food stamps and TANF? So both SNAP and TANF largely cover low-income families. SNAP in particular, it's a big program. About 40 million Americans receive food assistance through that program. With SNAP, people 18 to 49 are generally required to do some kind of work activity, be working, looking for work, maybe going to school, that kind of thing. Or they might be exempt because they're disabled or something like that.

Now House Republicans are proposing that people who are 50 to 55 also be required to perform some kind of work activity in order to receive SNAP benefits. And so that equals about a million people, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who would be newly subject to this expanded SNAP work requirement. And then there's TANF, which came into being in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. This was welfare reform, as people might remember. And so it's kind of the next generation of the old cash assistance programs that existed before TANF. But there was this major overhaul in the 1990s, and TANF, like SNAP, already has some work requirements. The change that House Republicans are proposing, it's kind of a technical change that has to do with the formula that the feds use to assess whether states are meeting what they are required to do when it comes to work requirements.

But the result is that more people would be subject to work requirements. There'd be fewer exemptions. And again, according to CBPP, about 500,000 people are expected to fall in this category of people who would be newly subject to a work requirement under TANF based on what House Republicans are proposing. And what about Medicaid? Have there been work requirements attached to that entitlement at all? Yes. So, you know, the idea of Medicaid work requirements have been around for a long time. And under the Trump administration, there was actually sort of an experiment in how it would work. The Trump administration will begin permitting states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. It is a major reversal of decades of policy. Three states at least actually made proposals and had them approved by the Trump administration. They were Arkansas, Kentucky,

and Indiana. Now, as you might imagine, almost immediately there was litigation filed to try to block these policies from going into place. And in Indiana and Kentucky, they never actually got off the ground. But in Arkansas, they did. There was a brief period, only a matter of months, where Arkansas actually had a work requirement in place. The results were pretty disastrous, as best as we can tell. So for starters, about 17,000 people lost their health insurance benefits through Medicaid because they either didn't meet the work requirement or they failed to maybe submit the paperwork. Some kind of administrative hiccup led to them losing coverage. I thought that

everything was good about this. I thought it was just a one-time deal that you reported and then that was it. He was wrong. He was supposed to log those hours online every month. He became one of the 12,000 people that the state has booted from the Medicaid rolls in the last three months. But what researchers went back and looked at later was like, okay, so people lost their health insurance. But like, part of the idea of work requirements in Republicans' mind is like, with a work requirement, people are going to try to get a job. You know, maybe that leads to them getting another job and eventually making more money and potentially getting a job with health insurance. And, you know, the goal here is to move more people off of government assistance. And so these researchers went back and looked at Arkansas and said,

okay, people lost coverage, but was there any change in their employment situation? And basically what they found was no. There was not any meaningful improvement in employment, especially among this population of people who were subject to the work requirement. And so it seemed like the end result in this brief experiment that we had with work requirements in Arkansas was that people lost coverage, but it did not lead to them getting jobs. It did not lead to them getting health coverage some other way. It probably just led to them becoming uninsured. Let's say that I am the person that the Republican Party is talking about. I am the

person who currently does not hold a job. They want me to do what exactly? Under what House Republicans are proposing, people have to work or perform some kind of work-related or community service activity in order to continue receiving Medicaid benefits. And so that's 80 hours a month, works out to about 20 hours a week, which is sort of what's standard for these proposals, and that's what exists already in SNAP in particular. And so states would presumably create, you know, paperwork that people would have to file to show that, you know, you have met that requirement, you are working these numbers of hours. But if the effectiveness of work requirements is unclear, and a situation like Arkansas suggests it actually doesn't work, at least not as well as it's supposed to,

why do Republicans feel so strongly about work requirements? Well, here's where I think it's maybe useful to bring in, like, the political context here in terms of the debt limit negotiations. You know, Republicans, they want to get something out of these debt limit negotiations. My Republican colleagues would like to see a plan that actually starts to bend that curve of exponentially increasing spending. We want to claw back some of the COVID funds that are unobligated. We want pro-growth policies like HR1. They set out a marker very early that they needed to get something in exchange for lifting the debt limit, even though it could lead to very serious economic

consequences. And they put it out very early that work requirements for social programs was a priority for them, along with spending cuts in general, permitting reform, a couple other things. I thought that language was telling. It was. Like, work requirements for social programs was the language I saw used, you know, early on from, like, really good congressional reporting outlets like Punchbowl News. And you're talking about SNAP? What program are you talking about specifically? Look, we're talking about all the programs. But now we're in this haggling game between the White House and Senate Democrats and the Senate in general and House Republicans. And there's been some signals that there's the potential for a trade here if we're going to be sort of crass and cynical about it. The Biden White House has said we're not doing a policy that would result in people losing

health coverage. And they themselves, the administration, has released projections that as many as 20 million people could be at risk of losing health insurance under Medicaid work requirements. So it's going to be really hard for them to then agree to Medicaid work requirements as part of a final debt limit deal with the House. But it's not that hard to imagine a situation where Medicaid work requirements get dropped by House Republicans because the Democrats have said, this just isn't going to happen for us. But some kind of deal on SNAP and TANF is reached. And like, you know, for the people who would be subject to these work requirements, obviously the consequences are very real. But if

you take a step back and look at it at a really high level, they are relatively marginal changes to work requirements that already exist, as opposed to with Medicaid, like it would be an entirely new policy that beyond this brief experiment in Arkansas hasn't really existed before. I'm not going to accept any work requirements that's going to impact on medical health needs of people. I'm not going to accept any work requirements that go much beyond what is already. Well, I voted years ago for the work requirements that exist, but it's possible there could be a few others, but not anything of any consequence. Coming up from Capitol Hill to Elizabethan England, the history of work requirements.

Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. NBA has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Chrissy Clark, and I am the senior correspondent and host of the Marketplace

investigative podcast, The Uncertain Hour. We explore obscure policies, forgotten histories, and why America is like this. And so we've looked at lots of things, including the long, fraught, and really misunderstood history of welfare. Is the call for work requirements to get entitlements like SNAP and Medicaid anything new? Not at all, is the short answer. All the way back in Elizabethan England, there was this idea of the deserving poor, people who were too old or too young or too sick to work, and those people were considered deserving of help. And then there were what was called the idle poor, people who it was thought

could work but refused to work. They were whipped in the streets and then sent to poorhouses often where they were forced to work. And then there was also this group of folks that were called the able-bodied poor, people who it was thought wanted to work but couldn't find a job. And they were also required to do labor often in return for aid. So going all the way back to that time, we have these impulses to sort of try to sort people and figure out who deserves this help. Are they working hard enough to get it? Or are they just being lazy? Okay, and then we fast forward 11,000 years to the creation of the United States. When in the U.S. do we first start proposing things like work requirements?

Yeah, so imagine a world where welfare, cash assistance for poor families, was completely uncontroversial who didn't have a male breadwinner, to stay in the house, not work, so that they could raise their children. These were called mother's pensions. To provide for children who have lost their breadwinners, the state and federal governments provide monthly cash payments so that these children may grow up at home with their own families. The program was pretty uncontroversial. Different states and localities had these cash assistance programs for poor families. But that question about who was deserving and who was not was still lurking in it. The program was explicitly meant for mothers of

worthy character that was often written into the way these programs were formed. And of course, that's a really subjective term. Oh, yeah. And it was up to local officials who were running these programs to decide what that meant. And very often, in fact, usually, that meant white women. In 1931, only 3% of the people getting these mothers' pensions were Black. And in the Deep South, where most Black people lived, the mismatch was even worse. There were about 3,000 white families who got this help

and only 39 Black families. When welfare really starts to get noticed and get all this public scrutiny and more calls for, we need work requirements to determine, you know, who are the loafers, who are the lazy people that are just on this program, even though they could work. That really starts to take hold in the late 50s and early 60s. And that is at a time when the welfare roles have become more inclusive and more Black families are joining them. That's the moment when it starts to get a lot, this program starts to get a lot of scrutiny. And especially in this town, Newburgh, New York.

This is one of the first places that really experiments with work requirements. And it starts in the 60s with this rumor that there are signs in bus stations around the South saying, move to Newburgh, New York, so you can get on welfare and not have to work. Completely unsubstantiated. There is no evidence that there actually were any signs like this. But this rumor took hold in Newburgh, and this one politician, the city manager of Newburgh, starts to just laser focus on blaming all of this on these Black migrants on welfare. And so he wages this war against welfare and puts some of the very first work requirements in place in the country that are meant to sort of, quote-unquote, weed out chiselers, as he calls them, people who are just loafing on the rolls.

We challenge the right of freeloaders to make more on relief than when working. We challenge the right of those on relief to loaf by state and federal edict. And we challenge the right of people to quit jobs at will and go on relief like spoiled children. Very quickly, groups like the NAACP, the local chapter in town, they see what's going on and they push back. The federal government, state government,

they start to look and say, actually, this is illegal. You can't put work requirements into this program. That's not part of the policy. Eventually, the city manager, Joseph Mitchell, who had championed this idea, is run out of town. The work requirements are canceled, rolled back. But a seed was planted. And of course, that comes to a head in the 80s and 90s when welfare reform takes hold and you hear rhetoric around, quote unquote, welfare queens

and welfare fraud and all of these people who are just dependent on the government and want a government check and not a paycheck. The question I ask about any welfare reform proposal is, will it help people become self-sufficient and lead a full life, or will it keep them down in a state of dependency? The big thing that I remember, Chrissy, about welfare reform, those two words together, is that it was Bill Clinton who signed it into law. It was a Democrat. What did Clinton's welfare reform law do exactly? So it basically took what this program, ADC, Aid to Dependent Children, or eventually it

became AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, what everybody calls welfare. It takes that program and turns it into what is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. The whole idea was, and you know, what you heard Bill Clinton talking about all the time is, This bill will help people to go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck. What does work count as? Like, how do they know that I'm working and what kind of job do I need to get? Like, what are the specifics? You're speaking my love language right now. Like, how do they know that I'm working and what kind of job do I need to get? Like, what are the specifics?

You're speaking my love language right now. Let's talk policy. So, yeah, and it's really confusing because I think there is this sense of like, oh, yeah, of course, you know, if you're poor, you should get a job. You should be working. That's the best way out of poverty. But if you look at like the details, sort of where the rubber meets the road of like, okay, we've said we want to require people to work in order to get welfare. What does that actually mean?

How do we actually turn that into policy? Basically, what it does is it requires a person to be doing a certain number of hours, usually between 30 and 35 hours, of this list of 12 federally approved work activities, quote unquote. And so a paying job could count as a work activity, but then there are all of these other activities. One is job search. There's also going to job readiness classes, sort of these motivational classes where you learn how to dress and how to interview for a job. There is some like vocational training, but only short-term vocational training that counts as work. That is the main metric that any state welfare program, they have to show to the federal government each month. These are the number of people that are on our welfare rolls who are able-bodied and we've

deemed they can work, and so they're subject to these work requirements. And out of them, how many of them are actually doing the right number of hours? And so what has happened, the whole thing has kind of become this compliance machine where there is so much red tape and paperwork involved in monitoring and documenting whether people are involved in these work activities and proving that they were there at the right time, that is what most of the energy is spent on. And a lot of the people that I spoke to who have gone through these programs, they felt actually completely counterproductive to their goal, which is, yes, I want a job, but I've actually had a bunch of jobs. They were super low paying and they got me to this point that I'm at right now, which is that I didn't have a financial safety net and had to turn to welfare to help me because something bad happened or, you know, my car broke down or I'm fleeing domestic violence. hours of work activities that are not helping me train to get a better job that's actually

going to allow me to become self-sufficient and not need to turn to welfare in the first place. You know, Chrissy, I have always gotten the impression that this rhetoric about working, working if you want an entitlement, works because it sounds like it's going to work. You motivate people, you give them a reason to get up in the morning. You give them some discipline in their lives. It sounds reasonable. Does it actually work? Does it improve people's lives and does it make it more likely that they get off welfare in the end? It's, you know, the good old American work ethic, sort of the American dream that like we, you know, if you work hard, you can get to where you want to go. And that sounds so good. And we want to believe that. And it is certainly true that there are some people who have had success with after they've gone through these welfare to work programs. But when you look back at what's happened since the 90s, when work requirements were put into welfare programs, there is very little evidence that any of it has had much

broad success on moving the needle. So there was a comprehensive survey that RAND did in the early 2000s, where they looked at dozens of other studies of state welfare reform initiatives that had mandated work activities, work requirements, and they found that it could modestly increase employment and earnings in the short term. But then when they would go back and check in with those families a few years later, the impacts were much smaller, if not gone away altogether. And the average earnings of program participants generally stayed very low and was not enough to move most of them above the poverty line. As that story in Newburgh showed, and the same thing happened in the 80s and 90s, there are easy reasons that a politician might turn to work requirements.

And that's also not to say, you know, I'm sure there are some folks who genuinely believe, like, this is the best way to get people out of poverty. But I think if you look at the evidence, if you look at the research, and often people point to caseloads, they say, hey, look, if you look in the 90s and compare it to now, the caseloads have dropped. That must mean the program is working, that people are not turning to welfare because they don't need to because they're not in poverty anymore. But if you actually look at the statistics, now out of every 100 families that are in poverty,

only 21 of those families turn to welfare anymore. So it's not that there aren't people in poverty. It's just that they've kind of given up on the system, I think often because they feel like the system has given up on them. Chrissy Clark is host of The Uncertain Hour from Marketplace. It is a rigorously reported and beautifully produced podcast. Chrissy, thank you so much. Thank you, Noelle.

Today's show was made by Amanda Llewellyn, Amina El-Sadi, Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Michael Raphael, and myself, Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.